20,000 years of impacts, adaptation and vulnerability : case studies from the Near East

People have a long and complex relationship with the environments they live in and issues such as resource availability and sustainability are far from new. This seminar uses case studies from Jordan, Iran and Turkey to investigate human-climate-environment relationships through the last 20,000 years. Working on or near archaeological sites, local environmental reconstructions, particularly of water availability, inform regional models of human adaptation to climate change e.g. during the beginnings of agriculture, and allow the assessment of people’s impact on the environment over millennia.